Riding Rockets

I was running from my thoughts…and predictably losing. Judy or El had flipped Mike’s PEAP to on. There had been no cockpit floor buckling, therefore no explosive decompression. Those twin facts opened the door to the possibility that the cockpit had held its pressure as tightly as a bathysphere and the crew had been conscious throughout the fall. Try as I might I could not find shelter in the evidence of crew inactivity. Would I have written a note? I seriously doubted it. Would I have jettisoned the overhead hatch? No. Of that, I was certain. Had I been Scobee or Smith, I would have been fighting to regain vehicle control all the way to the water, knowing that if I didn’t, death was certain. The hatch on-off status was irrelevant to survivability. I also thought it was a big leap to assume the crew would have felt it necessary to raise their visors and communicate by direct speaking. I had been in the backseat of F-4 jets when the intercom had failed and hand signals had worked fine. And Scobee and Smith, sitting side by side, had the advantage of being able to see exactly what the other was doing. If I had been in their position and was conscious with the helmet visor down, would I have taken the chance of raising it to communicate? To do so would have meant overcoming years of jet crewmember training, which emphasized keeping your maskon during flight, particularly if there was any hint cockpit pressure integrity might be compromised. The mask in this case would have been the helmet visor. I would have kept it down.

Like everyone else I wanted to believe the crew had been unconscious but there was no hard proof. I kept seeing the horrificother possibility, that they had gone down inChallenger like galley slaves chained to the benches of their sinking ship and been aware of every torturous second. They had been trapped. They had no escape system. They were flying anoperational space shuttle.

I couldn’t go on. I hit my wall. I slowed to a walk, steered off the track, found a tree, and collapsed against it. There would be no escaping the projector of my mind as it played what might have been the last moments ofChallenger.

“Challenger,you’re go at throttle up.”

Scobee answered, “Roger, Houston. Go at throttle up.”

Mike Smith watched the power tapes climb toward 104 percent. Even as he was doing so, the stack was disintegrating

The leaking fire had weakened the bottom SRB attachment strut. The right-side booster snapped free, rupturing the ET. Tons of propellant poured from the gas tank. The left-side booster ripped from its struts and joined the right-side SRB in chaotic, unguided flight.Challenger ’s fuselage and wings were broken into multiple parts. The cockpit was torn from its mounts.

At the instant of vehicle breakup the crew was whipsawed under their seat harnesses. Checklists were snatched from their Velcro tabs and jerked on their tethers. Pencils and drink containers separated from their tabs and were hurled through the volume. The noise of debris crashing into the outside of the cockpit added to the chaos. Exclamations of surprise came from some of the crew’s throats, but fell dead in their microphones. All electrical power had been lost at the separation of the cockpit from the rest of the fuselage.

The mayhem of breakup lasted only a moment before the equally startling calm of free fall began. While the cockpit and the other debris were still moving upward at 1,000 miles per hour, they were freely under the slowing influence of gravity. Like human cannonballs, the crew had experienced a momentary violence, followed immediately by the silence of gravity’s grip. They floated under their harnesses. Pencils and pens spun in the air around them. Checklists floated on their tethers.

The crew was alive but suffocating. They turned on their emergency air packs. Judy or El switched on Mike Smith’s PEAP.

Scobee and Smith were test pilots and reacted as they had been trained. Even the brief, wild ride through breakup would not have mentally incapacitated them. They had faced countless serious emergencies in their flying careers. They knew the situation was perilous, but they were in a cockpit with a control stick and there was a runway only twenty miles away. They believed they had a chance.

They snapped their attention to the instruments hoping to identify the problem, but the cockpit was electrically dead. Every computer screen was a black hole. Every caution and warning light was off. There were no warbling emergency tones. Every “talk back” indicator showed “barber pole”—its unpowered indication. The attitude indicator, the velocity, acceleration, and altitude tapes were frozen with OFF flags in view. They had nothing to work with. As they attempted to make sense of the situation, Scobee’s hand was never off the stick. He fought for vehicle control, oblivious to the fact there was no longer a vehicleto control.